


Susurration

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Confession, M/M, Period-Typical Sexism, References to Homophobia, References to flagellation, Victorian Attitudes, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 22:03:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/753580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Respectability. The tyranny of the gaze of others; the slavery all of London longs for."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Susurration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tazlet](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=tazlet).



I stood stock-still in the hallway, poised midway between the foot of one set of stairs and the head of those that took me down to the street.

The door of our sitting room stood agape, and the straight back and distilled concentration of my friend – my pattern, my idol – Sherlock Holmes occupied the direct line of sight. I would have called out to him had not the barbed-wire warning in his manner put me off. He was occupied in the act of drawing a riding crop across his open palm, stroking it back and forth as if teaching it the grain of his skin, the lines of life and heart. The motion was mesmerising to me and, as it seemed, to him too. There was no sound but his deep, even breaths and the susurration of fine leather.

I felt the crack of impact almost before my ears caught the low whistle of the blow. A single, hard stripe; he stared at his hand, lifted it closer to his face, turned it in the air, made a fist and hissed with the smart of it. Then he stretched out his musician's fingers once more and struck them a precise, vicious cut across the tips.

Self-experimentation was one thing; this was nearer self-abuse. A form of words that brought other, even more discomforting images to mind.

“A curious thing, is it not? Deliberately to court pain.”

He had known I was there, of course. No point in expressing surprise, in scolding him for the damage he might do to himself – even if he might have liked me to, not least for the sake of setting the stage. For no doubt he had his reasons, and they must be connected to some case at hand, so to speak. I entered from the wings and delivered my next lines well enough.

“What on earth is this all about, Holmes?”

Uncharacteristically, he missed his own cue, absorbed by some idea which from his face seemed vital, yet distinctly unwelcome. He shook it off with a grimace and picked up a slim volume from the arm of the settee. A letter stood for a bookmark. This he took out, unfolded and passed to me to read aloud.

_“Dear Mr Holmes,_

_The enclosed arrived in a parcel of antiquarian books from Messrs Stellar and Brighton of Paternoster Row – merchants of unimpeachable respectability and repute. Yet I dare say even they would not be immune from charges were it known that they sent out this filth. This is a matter I should undoubtedly have brought to the attention of the Police, were it not for the most regrettable associations which might be implicated to my own household. Discretion is the word, sir, discretion. _

_Find out who sent this, why they sent it, and what action I may take against the guilty party. Communicate with me only. All charges, expenses and incidentals shall be met without question._

_I remain, sir,_

_Yours faithfully_

_Harold Fee.”_

“Of course, I must ignore his request,” said Holmes. Obediently I went to put the letter in the file set aside for rejected suits – a file that had fattened to bursting along with his fame.

He held up an imperious forefinger. “No, no: the request to 'communicate with him only'. That would tie me too tightl...” He winced. “...b-be about as much use as asking a blind man the way to Piccadilly.” 

His slip, the scene from earlier on, and the letter, warned me that we were about to enter muddy waters. I knew of such books, of such sports, of the ardent aficionados of cane, whip and rope: had even had one or two in my surgery looking for discreet treatment after over-indulgence in the birching houses. Had Holmes, in secret, been one of them I should not have judged him. It is really quite common. Yet the combination of detached enquiry and distaste with which he approached the subject seemed to say otherwise; seemed to say that he would be content to solve only part of the puzzle that presented itself here. The who, perhaps, but not necessarily the why. Whatever the true motive might turn out to be, unsettled him to imagine; for the answer did not seem to be the obvious one, even to me.

“There is no hint of blackmail,” he agreed as I gave back the letter and received the offending article in exchange. “Mr Fee may be only the moral crusader he appears to be: or the offence may be closer – much closer – to home. Though if this is a scheme to draw fire away from himself, it seems a trifle elaborate... and he has chosen the wrong accomplice.”

The Truth – Sherlock Holmes' favourite quarry. And before too long it might be on very inconvenient display.

I turned the book over in my hands – a cheap thing bound in pink board, the text all crammed up against the margins – and let it fall open at what page it would. There were colour plates, here and there, crudely vivid sketches of men sprawled in attitudes of ecstasy, clothes hitched up over bare, white buttocks flushed rosy with beatings, of women whose breasts peeked artfully from loosened corsets as they brandished all manner of switches, crops and cords. A fragment of narrative caught my eye:

_“warm me, Miss Jo, warm my arse to fire and cool it with your lilly hand, then stand me up and pull me off, as many strokes as you like. I'm man enough and to spare as you can plainly see”_

and I threw the book down, ashamed under my friend's unblinking eye to be flushed with more than embarrassment. I did not need the encouragement of the lash. Abstinence – many months of abstinence – and the suggestion of another's hand tight on my member, moving on me, coaxing and commanding...

Holmes had mercy on me and said nothing. His face said it all for him – _poor fellow, would that you were as I am, but I suppose it cannot be helped._

Harold Fee, tea merchant ( _”Fee's Teas, if you please”_ ), lived in Camberwell, in a smart street with still smarter ambitions. Flocks of aproned maids busied themselves polishing windows: just enough out of the way to spare visitors the necessity of acknowledging them, but remaining visible marks of prosperous pride. Mr Fee had in addition that talisman of success a male indoor servant, who ushered us into a hall heavy with mahogany, plush and gilt framing. Five of the six permanent members of the household had been mustered in the hall – Fee; Mr Newce-Parsons, his personal secretary and business manager; the butler and maids. The cook lived out but was also present. Mrs Fee was “still indisposed, sir” according to Alice, the upstairs girl. The look she and her employer exchanged was coloured with resignation, not concern.

“I must make it clear, Mr Holmes, that I only agreed to this, well, to be frank, intrusion on the grounds that I trust all the members of my household to the uttermost. I am confident that the contagion came from outside.”

“Indeed,” my friend answered, apparently in the act of scrutinising a pedestal table by the front door. “Well, I have no such confidence and, since you engaged my services upon my terms, my mistrust will have to serve. Post is left here, as a rule?” He swept the top of the table with a gloved hand and inspected the motes of dust. Fee nodded.

“In this case, the parcel was too large. Mr Newce-Parsons received it and placed it on my desk in the study.”

That gentleman stepped forward. A tall man who stooped, looking at the world through thick spectacles and contemptuous of what little he could make out of it, he passed one hand across his greasy pate to press down further the wisps of hair that spanned it like withered palm fronds slick with pomade. As he raised his eyes to address Holmes, he frowned, reaching for a memory. Holmes for his part made a small grunt of surprise. Yet all he said was:

“And you give your word that it was quite sealed, and remained so?”

Newce-Parsons gave his word, curtly. Somewhere in the middle of a sneer came his own recognition of Holmes, but he too did not allude to it. Instead of pressing the man, to my own surprise Holmes merely directed me to note down his reply. The servants likewise each swore on their honour that they had never touched the box, would never interfere with the master's things.

“Hmm. Expected, but not of course conclusive,” muttered the detective as he crossed the hall. A chorus of grumbles as to what a person's word was worth in this day and age rose and fell behind him.

“Now I must speak with Mrs Fee. Alice, if you please.” He pointed up the stairs. Fee, however, stopped the girl in her tracks.

“Certainly not, Mr Holmes. My wife is not to know anything of this matter; it must not even be hinted at. She has a most refined and sensitive nature: her peace of mind is my daily study.”

“Is this an investigation, Mr Fee, or a mere piece of theatre? A note, at least, merely enquiring as to the parcel. Unless she has some special horror of brown paper and string?”

Fee scowled but took the note up, after insisting Holmes not sign his real name, “as it is notoriously associated with crime and vice.” (my friend let that by with a tight smile). He substituted an alias supposedly connected to Messrs. Stellar and Brighton.

Once their master had turned the corner of the stairs, the servants' chorus began again. Holmes very subtly canted one ear toward the whispers, all the while delivering a dissertation addressed to me on the importance of knots in determining whether a package has been tampered with, whilst raking over Newce-Parsons for a reaction.

The rest of the visit – the close inspection of Fee's study and the remains of the package, the scornful raised brow with which Holmes heard Mrs Fee's answer that she knew of no parcel, the promise to wire with any news – passed as might a church parade, full of necessary ceremony but little enlightenment. As we rattled back to Baker Street, Holmes enumerated the possibilities .

“The book was either wanted, or unwanted, by someone in that house. It represents a gift, a transaction or a threat. I have studied it closely for ciphers, codes or hidden messages – I found none, save the eternal mystery of taste and predilection. It is of course possible that several persons at Camberwell are excellent actors and that one of more of them is lying. But I think we may eliminate cook, and the maids. From their private chatter, they had some idea that Mr Fee's reference to 'contagion' had something to do with smallpox. He had better knock that idea on the head or he will be washing his own linen and taking out the slops by the end of the week.”

“Which leaves Newce-Parsons and the butler – what was his name, French?” I agreed. I coughed and broached the delicate subject. “The secretary does seem to bear some of the hallmarks of...self-indulgence – weak back, weak eyes, premature hair loss, for he cannot be more than thirty. Holmes, if I may say so, it seemed that you knew him?”

My companion turned a baleful eye on me. “As to that, we may come to it later. As to the other, _really_ , Doctor. You will be prescribing cupping and bloodletting next. If the habits of men were indeed so clearly visible in their persons I may as well invest in a copy of Lombroso and walk the streets selecting 'criminals' on sight rather than by analysis and deduction based on evidential fact. You omitted, too, Mr and Mrs Fee from your suspects. Entirely premature.”

I thought of protesting that he himself had all but dismissed Fee already, but I knew that a stiff lecture on the vital importance of the phrase “all but” would likely follow and kept quiet.

“The fair sex, too, keep their little secrets,” Holmes continued with a sniff. The subject of Women And Their Ways always provoked in him the airy generalisations of an ignoramus. He had once boasted that he knew nothing of women and wanted to know less than he did. “Consider the fact that Mrs Fee's money founded, and underpins, her husband's empire of tea. She is the daughter of Sir Augustus Brown of Southwold, gentleman. He provided her a tidy, though characteristically prudent, settlement upon the marriage of which she is, according to the law, in full control. She could, given reason, leave Harold Fee at the mercy of a few bad harvests.”

How he knew this without having spoken to the lady, astounded me. One of the many strands of that web of information and reciprocity which covered London with a fine gossamer film of Sherlock Holmes, no doubt.

So, his theory was that an ill-wisher might have wanted to shock Mrs Fee with the coarseness of men, of Mr Fee, in order to undermine his prosperity? Surely there were less elaborate ways. Besides, the parcel had gone straight to Fee's study; she would have no reason to see its secret burden, unless she _meant_ to intercept the post.

How I should have preferred not to have _this_ conversation, with _this_ man. Yet he relied on me to ask questions, to buffer his racing train of thought with my own duller wits. I raised all those objections, and capped it with a tentative question of my own.

“I suppose it is possible that she might herself be... curious about that sort of material?”

Holmes' expression was that of a man who finds a species of worm unknown to science, thoroughly squashed in the lining of his silk hat.

“I defer to your judgement on the curiosity of womankind, Doctor,” he muttered with a small shudder. Stirring himself, he found solid ground again in picking apart my argument. “Yet it does not seem to fit with a sensitive and ailing nature. Besides, where would she, a sheltered girl of good family, have even come to know of its existence?” He paused. “That world – crude, base – surely belongs to men. Nature” – the word hung uncertainly on a broken branch in his voice, as if nature was a nest too heavy to be entirely a haven – “defines us so. The earthly to their spiritual.”

We had seen some very dark facets of human nature, he and I, had faced them with barely a flinch: treachery and greed, murder and the betrayal of sacred and natural ties. This – this was trivial, in truth. A peccadillo. Yet Holmes' unease at having to step into the tangled forest of sexual desire in pursuit of the mystery, could not have been clearer. 

He brooded over the case for half a day: smoking, sighing, turning over papers from his index, searching for some tiny detail he would not share with me. I offered him assistance but he would have none of it. He would answer no questions, not even when I remembered to ask him once more whether, as it seemed, he was already acquainted with Mr Newce-Parsons. At least when he finally gathered up hat and coat and swept out without a backward glance he made no objection to my coming along.

At the offices of Stellar and Brighton, hard by St Paul's, discreet enquiries rapidly gave way to very indiscreet ones. The mention of the word “pornography” in a respectable publishing house, even in the senior partner's private office, is apt to create a stir. A solid wall of denial met us at every turn. The parcel left Paternoster Row, so Mr Thomas Stellar assured us, containing only a selection of volumes on the natural history of Ceylon and Mauritius, bound copies of _The Critic_ magazine, some novels and the latest Wisden (“We do not ourselves put out that particular work of reference but merely carry it as... regular sales stock,” winced the chief clerk, who was a rugby man). We were given a copy of the bill of sale and assurances that their regular courier was a firm of unimpeachable trustworthiness. It was quite impossible that deliveries could have been tampered with _en route_.

“Popular interpretation of the word 'impossible' never ceases to amaze me,” Holmes remarked outside, as he dipped into the damp and crumbling alley leading to Paternoster Square, pulling me with him. “Let us have a quiet pint, dear boy, then we shall quench our thirst for knowledge even as the lower orders at Stellar and Brighton satisfy theirs for beer.”

In a corner of the Sir Christopher Wren public house, we sampled a dark porter and waited. Just as Holmes had predicted, shortly after the stroke of six, a gaggle of young men came in and ranged themselves round a table, mocking each other good-naturedly and roundly cursing the name of Samuel Brighton for a slave-driver. Holmes flattened himself against the wall and tucked his chin into his coat collar. As the clerks' conversation flowed with the drink, a slow, twisting smile crept to his lips. When he decided he had heard enough, we slipped out through the yard.

“Home, Watson.” I dutifully hailed a cab, but had barely climbed aboard when he waved it on. Though I called after him, he did not hear, but instead fixed his eyes on the dusty pavement. He had gone again to that place I can never follow, amid the busy machine of his working mind, winding threads together from a thousand spools to weave a cloth no-one else could reproduce.

He did not return until past midnight, and we met next at breakfast. At first, I took his silence for mere keeping his cards close to his chest, as was his habit – the better to surprise when he swept the pot at the end of the game. A closer look betrayed, rather, dismay and disappointment. I caught his eye, fearing a rebuff, but fearing more missing a chance to help. He spoke softly, to himself as much as to me.

“Respectability. The tyranny of the gaze of others; the slavery all of London longs for. A whisper, a susurration in the marketplace, that someone is not whom he appears to be, whom he ought to be, and all is lost. I had thought better of them.”

“I don't quite follow. Thought better of whom?”

“The Committee of the Diogenes Club.”

Holmes ordinarily spoke as little of that establishment as its members did to each other in the course of an evening there, so I was consumed with curiosity. 

“As you supposed, I have met Mr Newce-Parsons before. He was put up for the Diogenes last year and blackballed. I did not concern myself with the reasons at the time. Now, I discover that my brother, amongst others, made representations that he should be barred, not for any genuine cause – not for engaging the staff in idle conversation when signing the visitors' book, nor for criticising the dinner menu before Strangers – but for being such as might, if admitted, bring the club into 'disrepute'.”

“What had he done?”

“Nothing, save that he was observed in the forecourt of Charing Cross station in the company of a well-dressed youth with whom he seemed on friendly terms. That alone is apparently enough to condemn him. He could have been asking the time of day, but no. The club has already been the subject of adverse comment due to the peculiarities of its constitution, we must not attract undue attention, word gets round, etcetera. Pah!” He threw down his unread newspaper and his coffee cup and its saucer parted company with a musical crash.

“But Holmes, word _does_ get round, and with some cause. There was an article in the Daily Chronicle there”- I pointed to the paper with the marmalade spoon - “only last week warning against such youths: the danger of disease, the undoubted fact that many are pressed into that life, are made criminals by the crimes of others. There is, as well, the danger of blackmail...”

“Only because people are so absurdly apt to jump to conclusions. Blackmailers do not even need a real crime, a real fault. Mere appearance is enough - which rather proves my point, don't you think, Watson? We live in fear, we 'respectable' people. Fear of shadows.”

“Except Sherlock Holmes,” I said, fondly, “who has nothing to fear and if he did, would not fear it anyway.”

He did not reply aloud, only scowled into his coffee and muttered a few words I could not catch, save for the opinion that I was a fool. I do not demand scintillating, nor even necessarily coherent, conversation so early in the morning but sheer incivility in response to a genuine compliment puts me out of sorts.

“I had better take my _foolishness_ to the post office. I have a story to send in.”

If I had had some notion of provoking an apology, none was forthcoming. One hand waved me off whilst the other was occupied cradling his chin, elbow on the table. If it was still there when she came to clear away, Mrs Hudson would have words.

“ I must beg your pardon, Watson,” my companion said to the picture of general Gordon as I came back half an hour later. He was speaking with his back to me, but I am used to that. I took the sentiment for what it was worth.

“My brother and I exchanged some heated words ourselves yesterday evening,” he continued. “And I learned, as I should have known before, that intelligence and wisdom are not always two sides of a coin. Nor intelligence and kindness, for I was unkind, and to you, the kindest of men. But I must beg you, do not make that same mistake as those who judge a man by the cut of his coat and the many who speak well of him. Do not think I have no fears. Do not think that a few little foibles and a practised disdain for society mean that I do not bend under the yoke of respectability as much as any man. On what rests the foundation of my work, of my livelihood? Analysis and deduction, you may say. Reputation, rather. Trust in appearances.”

His name passed from client to client; the stories; newspaper reports; Police confidences: he was right, of course, but...

“More than appearances, surely. Results speak loudest of all, Holmes.” 

He shook himself and jumped up from his chair in the same, swift movement, so fast that my neck cracked as I watched him: once again, the Great Detective. It is no exaggeration that I live for such moments.

“And do we hear the sound of a result hallooing? Fee: he was at his appointment, with witnesses, at the time the parcel was delivered; if the book was a missile, it was ill-aimed – not the habit of blackmailers. If a folly, it lay unopened until his return – the knot was undisturbed, the string cut by his own pocket knife – a distinctive blade which I had the opportunity to examine. Newce-Parsons had not touched it – again, if he was expecting it, he would have extracted the article and redone the knots, his employer (though not I) none the wiser, the same goes for French. If either of them was not expecting it, how is he held to ransom with no firm connection between him and the 'outrage' ? No motive to risk exposure of what they could have easily hidden. Domestic staff - appear genuinely to know nothing. Which leaves, by simple subtraction...”

“Mrs Fee.”

“The former Miss Brown, of Southwold in the County of Suffolk. It so happens that I detected the remnants of a Suffolk dialect in the speech of one of Stellar and Brighton's clerks and after you left for Baker Street, I doubled back and lay in wait for him. A swift change of context, headgear and accent - a deplorable lowland Scots one, you would have been unable to contain yourself; besides, you too, Watson, are _vital_ context -” (he had seen my flash of discontent at being excluded) “ - and we fell into conversation. I discovered that he did know Southwold, and the Browns, indeed knew the name of the son, who presently works at the Foreign Office.”

“Whom you can scarcely approach on this subject!”

“ I had not been about to suggest any such thing. Patience, my boy, patience ...who presently works at the Foreign Office, and whose background has thus been looked into rather more thoroughly than might be usual. His appointment was nearly derailed by one unfortunate association. However, it was deemed sufficiently obscure, oblique and domestic not to come to the notice of foreign powers.”

“It had, however, come to _my_ notice, and I have today put all the pieces of this puzzle together. Some years ago, during the time when, as you put it, 'marriage had drifted us away from one another', I was asked to make enquiries into accusations of theft at the St Agnes' School for Young Ladies, Lowestoft. The visiting music teacher was suspected of making off with pupils' jewellery, and the governors wished to avoid the scandal of a police investigation. I soon discovered that theft had nothing to do with either teacher or scandal. Mr Septimus Crouch had introduced a teaching method of his own devising quite unconnected to the Tonic Sol-Fa system.”

Holmes paused and cleared his throat . “I hope it is not too much to think that a connection to the case suggests itself without further explanation.”

“Miss Brown was also a pupil at the school.”

“Bravo, Watson. She was one of a handful of girls who refused to be questioned about Crouch. A look in the index triggered a faint memory, which took a little time to come into focus: Brown is not a rare surname, after all. The governors congratulated themselves on their pupils' modesty and dismissed my suggestion that they were protecting him. They dismissed Crouch all the same, but expelled the girl who told me the truth, pinning the thefts on both. Appearances were preserved.”

I suppressed the image of Holmes being informed by a seventeen-year-old girl that her music teacher had spanked her. I suppressed even harder the notion of him contemplating the fact that several of her school friends had rather enjoyed the experience. Holmes enquired if I had a touch of indigestion.

How indeed he found the words to tell Harold Fee that his wife had, through agents of her own (Holmes suspected the Suffolk clerk, whose watch chain was a little too fine to be within the means of a lock keeper's son), planted a volume of flagellation stories in a shipment intended for his private library, I do not know. He sent his client a lengthy telegram, and had by reply one over which he laughed, shortly, then put in the fire. I shot a guess at the deduction Holmes had presented.

“She did not try to intercept the book, as she might easily have done, because she wished him to see it first, to...test the waters. To see if her husband might suggest what she herself dared not. I suppose he refused to pay you.”

“'Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will return to you after many days', as the Scripture has it,” he quoted with a wry smile; the same as he wore the day, not so long after, that a cheque arrived in the post. 

“Newce-Parsons writes to me, from his new situation, that his former master has dismissed the live-in domestic staff _en masse_ ,” he told me, a fortnight later still. “Best not have a public reputation as a moral crusader if one plans to have... irregular private habits. Servants' whispers have ruined better men.”

“I believe Mrs Fee's health may soon take a turn for the robust, Holmes,” I dared, not looking him in the eye. She would certainly not be the first 'sickly' wife whose headaches and fainting fits had more to do with a doltish, unimaginative bed partner (or, sad to say, worse) than want of medicine.

He reached for a cigarette, lit it and drew a long pull before exhaling in one long, quivering sigh of distaste.

“Please, Doctor, spare me any further diagnosis in that direction. So much for the spirituality of females.”

“You will be campaigning for clerical celibacy next. There is nothing wrong with a healthy physical appetite. They are married, after all. A few discreet quirks between man and wife, well...”

That seemed to put him out even more. He scowled steadily at the hearthrug and ran through two more cigarettes in quick succession before casting the last stub into the grate, folding his arms tightly across his chest and wondering aloud:

“How is it that the human race can build the Eiffel Tower, run trains underground and communicate by a cable laid over a thousand miles of sea floor and must still break off its highest endeavours to...copulate like rats?”

“You make it sound so sordid, Holmes. Have we not all had many moments of tenderness, of dear affection mixed with our passions? The animal and the spiritual are not such strangers to each other; they are reconciled in many a happy home.”

“I will take your word for it,” he replied with a sneer and stalked off to his room, leaving me gaping in his wake.

I had always thought it a bit of an act, in truth: dutifully included in the stories because it fed his conceit about himself and fascinated my readers (particularly my lady readers) with the thought that a man existed without the need, or the wish, for love. He wanted to seem that man, wanted it very much. The thought that he might actually have succeeded in being him filled me with dismay. In fallow periods, I have sometimes resorted to paid embraces – again, I do not judge. But to exist on nothing but that, year after year, deliberately? Or to flee it all: to despise the consolations of the body as well as the heart? 

I knocked on his door, wanting to make peace before I retired for the night. Quarrels, like scalds, should not be left to fester.

“Leave me be.”

“Holmes... if I spoke out of turn, I am sorry.”

A half-minute of silence and the door opened a crack. He had taken off his collar and cuffs, an evening shadow at his jaw, sparse, dark trails of hair on his forearms and at the open neck of his shirt, coal dusted on ivory. To fascinate so, and be only half aware of half the reasons why... 

“No. Only it is not so simple, Watson.” He leaned against the door jamb and looked me up and down, as if memorialising me against an uncertain future. Then he closed his eyes. 

“ I suppose now is as good – or bad – a time as any to say it. Some natures are what the world is pleased to call unnatural; some affections irredeemably unspiritual. A man cursed with them can never be respectable, whomever he puts from his life the moment they suspect him, however _discreet_ his intimacies. He faces a stark choice. Never strive for excellence, never aspire to the public eye, whatever his talents: or, never give in to nature, not for a moment. Never let the mask slip. What mask an individual chooses – well, in that at least he has some freedom. _Mariage blanc_ ; religion; 'pure, cold reason': they may all serve.”

I didn't understand.

Then - suddenly, sickeningly – I did. 

It was not he that sickened me, never suppose that. I am not, after all, such a hypocrite. What sickened were the chains that appeared in ghostly form around his thin frame, the way he slumped under their weight.

“Those harsh words with your brother?”

I put as much quiet sympathy into the question as I safely could. Pity is poison to a man so proud.

He nodded, eyes still tight shut. “ I was reminded, as Newce-Parsons was warned. Give not the slightest quarter to the enemy, without or within. Appear to be nothing, rather than appear to be what you are. Brother Mycroft has schooled me in that duty since I was a youth, since he found me out before I knew myself. As our father would not have done, had he ever had the least suspicion.”

I gathered that in that case he would have had far less mercy.

“I... know of some who manage it, Holmes. Whose public face is secure and whose private life is a closed book.”

Now he looked at me, wise and stern, and I saw myself through his eyes. _I have read your book, Watson. You think you are safe because, nineteen times out of twenty, for you it is a woman; because you only look at other men and think that no-one sees; but all it takes to fall is one misstep on shifting sand._

“Not half as many as I have seen ruined who tried. The privacy of a man's mind is all he has, in the end.”

His knowledge of me was no great shock: he was Sherlock Holmes. It was his fear that was a surprise. Hating the fear, I was angry with him as much as for him.

“So you give in, not only on the surface but to the core. You deny yourself not only the obvious, the dangerous, the clearly immoral – rent boys and guardsmen, bought for a few shillings wherever want runs both ways. There is more, whatever you tell yourself, if only you will unbend so far as to trust those who can be trusted. What of companionship? What of lov-”

He cut me off, batting away the thought with a sweep of one hand, as if it was formed out of smoke.

“What of it? Does the hare put its own foot in a snare, when it has escaped the hounds?”

I shook my head. He stood still-half-framed in the doorway, holding the door like a shield, braced against appeal.

“It runs home,” I ventured softly, “where it is as safe as it can ever be and still live – and surely life is more than mere existence.” Then, more boldly, for I would press the argument, now that all was known: “You know one who can be trusted. Here he stands. Is Sherlock Holmes less than a hare? Does he seek merely to exist, or does he want to live?”

The door shut abruptly in my face. I heard a thump from the other side as his back hit it, the rasp of his shallow breathing. I called to him, again and more urgently as I got no answer. It was in the very act of turning away, deciding that I had presumed too far, that I heard the turn of a door handle.

His face was flint, all cutting edges and grey shadows, slicing at me with his gaze. Flayed thus, I opened myself utterly to him, let my features serve my feelings faithfully, even as he had once observed. My own inclinations; my acceptance of them in others; my admiration of a brilliant mind, a high soul, a frozen heart; my wish – my offer – to warm it back to life. The inclusion of whatever physical intimacies he might permit. The warning that if he spoke of charity, if he accused me of sacrifice, I would be very angry indeed.

“Take your time,” I added aloud. “Consider the possibility. It lies open indefinitely, but without obligation. You may find that home is, after all, elsewhere for you.”

He smiled then, faint but unmistakable, and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“No. Whatever follows next, my dear Watson, that particular point was settled long ago.”

 

END

...or not :-)

**Author's Note:**

> beta thanks to spacemutineer


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